


Perfect

by pyxystyx



Category: StarCraft
Genre: Dom/sub, F/F, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-09 01:10:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7781110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyxystyx/pseuds/pyxystyx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kerrigan has big plans for a captured ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfect

The space-to-atmosphere transition is always unspeakably loud, for some reason. Ghost 49851 sits stone still, senses fully alert. The dropship's landing bay, designed to carry a full squad of marines in their bulky battle armor or a pair of mountainous siege tanks, feels cavernous when empty. 49851 hates dropships insofar as it can hate anything.

49851 turns inwards, as it has been taught, and pulls up a swirl of mission schematics, maps, and briefings. The available intel is slim, and there's far more uncertainty than is usually allowed in Ghost operations, but the target is valuable and the opportunity is unique.

49851's hands wander over its equipment. The canister rifle, the backup sidearm, the special target designator for this mission are all so familiar that 49851 can tell without looking that they're in perfect order. Ammunition pouches are checked and rechecked. The mission timeline is a scant two days, by which time 49851 will either be safely en route back to base or long dead.

The dropship pilot's voice crackles over the intercom.

"One minute to drop zone. Be ready, it's hot out there."

49851 sighs into its skinsuit respirator with relief. The part of the mission where it sits helpless and trusts others to protect it is almost over.

\-----

49851 is out of the dropship within five seconds of touchdown. It doesn't look back as it runs for the nearest cover and cloaks. The cloaking device will drain even 49851's augmented power cells in a matter of minutes, but this is the most delicate, vulnerable moment of the mission and the optical invisibility is worth it.

After the noise of the dropship has faded into the distance, 49851 uncloaks itself, orients based on the maps displaying in its optics, and sets off. There are no navigation beacons, no orbital satellites to fix its position, and so location will be strictly via landmarks and dead reckoning. 49851's suit electronics handle most of the work, so it focuses instead on its surroundings.

This planet is an ugly, dead place, the ecosystem long since burnt out and gutted, the skies permanently choked with toxic gases. The soil, where there is soil and not naked rock, is more like gray dust, and 49851 wonders in passing what brought the Zerg to this forsaken place in the first place. It doesn't know - there's no need for it to know - and 49851 puts the question out of its mind.

\-----

49851 hikes for sixteen hours. The broken ground is rough terrain, but makes for easy cover against both ground and air observation. 49851 stays on edge the entire time, compulsively scanning its surroundings, and eventually comes to a sheltered hole in the bare rock, barely enough to qualify as a cave. Here 49851 stops to rest, to jam a stick of nutrient paste into its mouth, and to go over the next phase of the mission.

It is just under two kilometers to the target: a newborn Zerg hive, a tiny foothold on this planet and in this sector. The Zerg base is still newly established, probably poorly defended, and the Dominion has a narrow window to drive them off this world without a full-fledged invasion.

49851 checks the designator again with its hands as the mission parameters scroll past its vision. Within five hundred meters is close enough. Once the designator is down, 49851 has only a few minutes to clear the blast radius, so it will need to be prepared to move quickly.

\-----

Two hours of painstaking, agonizingly slow movement brings 49851 to within a kilometer of the hive. From here, it's clear that the intel was, for once, reasonably accurate: there are a bare handful of Zerg structures, and no more than a couple hundred individual Zerg scattered around them.

Now comes the risky part. As 49851 gets closer to the Zerg, despite all its optical camouflage and stealthy movement, the risk of detection rises inexorably. It must get to within the appropriate radius of the hive, then activate the designator and move quickly away.

It ducks behind a rocky outcrop and activates its comms system. Its suit reaches out electronically for the mothership, but in response, 49851 gets only a storm of static. This is an unexpected issue, and 49851 tries several more times, to no avail.

Unable to contact the mothership, 49851 has two options: disengage and head for the pickup point, or close in and attempt to lay down the designator anyway. 49851 doesn't even consider disengaging.

It closes in, cloaked now, holding its breathing slow and steady. This part of the mission calls for absolute silence and invisibility. 49851 is heavily armed and trained as close to perfection as humans can go, but weapons fire would give away its presence, and stealth is a necessity here, so its canister rifle and sidearm stay in their holsters.

\-----

The designator isn't having any more luck communicating with the mothership than 49851 is, and it wonders briefly what could be wrong with both the suit electronics and the designator. It resets the designator, crouching, half of its attention always on its suit's power reserves and threat monitor.

\-----

49851 watches its suit's power reserves tick down to sixty seconds of cloak time remaining. This is just about the bare minimum for a successful exit and evasion, and the designator still remains stubbornly unconnected to the mothership. 49851 must now either evade and save itself at the expense of the mission, or commit to uncloaking dangerously close to the Zerg.

49851 glares at the designator and resets it yet again.

\-----

This time, the designator comes back up, and its connection light blinks a bright, lethal green. 49851 presses the activation buttons, kicks a thin layer of grey soil over it, then immediately takes off at a dead run. It will have no trouble clearing the nuke's blast radius, but it has only nineteen seconds of cloak time remaining.

\-----

49851 almost reaches cover in time.

\-----

A pack of zerglings, at the closest edge of the Zerg base to 49851, spot the Ghost moving instantly when its cloak deactivates. The Swarm understands, with a sudden flash of insight, what is being done, why a single Ghost is skulking on the edge of the Zerg base, and as one mind, the Zerg guardians of the base rush towards Ghost 49851.

\-----

The searing flash of the tactical nuclear weapon makes the landscape around 49851 momentarily flare bright as the sun, and then the crushing blast wave rattles its teeth. Fortunately, 49851 was outside the lethal radius; unfortunately, so were many of the Zerg pursuing it.

49851 runs. Running offers it a better chance of survival than stopping to shoot - not that 49851 is carrying enough ammunition to fight off a hundred Zerg anyway. It ducks into a ravine, and when it chances a look upwards at the sky, realizes it is doomed, after all, and though 49851's mission was successful, it will die here, in this gray dirt.

\-----

Far above 49851, a cloud of Zerg flyers circles, flocking like grotesque birds, and among the cloud are the Overseers, and the Overseers can feel the Ghost's heartbeat, and cannot be evaded nor hidden from, and now for the first time it can remember 49851 tastes despair.

\-----

49851 takes up a position at the far end of the ravine, canister rifle trained on the entrance. All it can do now is take some of the Zerg with it.

\-----

In the end, 49851 expends most of its canister ammunition, half of its sidearm ammunition, and all of its grenades by the time the Swarm reaches it, climbing over the bodies of dozens of their own dead.

\-----

Surprisingly, 49851 wakes up. It tests its body cautiously, and finds itself uninjured, but it is in pitch darkness and its suit electronics are partially dead. It tries to sit up, and finds that it's unable to. Careful exploration with its hands reveals that it is in a tubular container, made of some tough and inflexible material, just barely large enough to contain 49851's body. Its weapons and other equipment seem to be missing.

49851 does its best to relax, holding its breathing flat and level. This is not so different, after all, from the capsule it sleeps in at the Ghost Academy. Further careful exploration reveals that 49851's emergency knife is still sheathed against its thigh, although it proves just as useless against the container as 49851's gloved hands are.

In the absence of any other option, 49851 forces itself into the conditioned battle-trance, which leaves its senses hyper-aware for any sign of where it is being kept and its mind quiet. There are no mechanical noises, but there is a persistent thrumming sound, like a rush of fluid through massive veins, and soon 49851 realizes that what it's hearing is the beating of a massive heart.

\-----

At some point, 49851 falls unconscious. It awakens for scattered moments, but something is wrong, very wrong, with its body chemistry and with the skinsuit electronics unable to stabilize it, it can't seem to focus or pay attention to its environment.

49851 surfaces for just a second when its skinsuit is removed, with bizarre, inexplicable care. It should fight, it thinks, but its body feels heavy and its mind feels sluggish, and before it can work out what to do it slips back into unconsciousness.

The next time 49851 surfaces, it is lying on a table in a dimly-lit room. When it tries to move, its body won't respond at all. It has a crushing headache and is overwhelmingly hungry, but there's nothing for it, so 49851 stares at the ceiling. Moments after it wakes, a humanoid blur enters its vision, and when 49851 manages to focus its eyes at last, a chill creeps up its spine.

49851 is looking up at the face of Sarah Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades.

\-----

Kerrigan's face is the only recognizable part of her. Her hair is long gone, replaced with segmented tendrils that Dominion intelligence believes have something to do with her incredible psionic powers. The worst part of her, though, is the eyes. 49851 is a trained assassin. It has been subjected to things that would have killed lesser humans outright and come out the other side. In spite of that, it cannot look into those eyes. They are human, on the surface, but behind them the promise of extinction burns.

"Well, hello," Kerrigan says, and her voice is... hollow, somehow, as though it is uncountable billions of voices in perfect harmony, building and echoing atop each other. 49851 won't look at her - can't - and instead it stares at the ceiling.

"The quiet type?", says Kerrigan, with an edge of mockery in her voice, and 49851 struggles to put up its psionic shield but it's not working, something's wrong, and then Kerrigan smirks and her smile bares her fangs.

"There's no hiding from me, little Ghost," she says, and then 49851 feels Kerrigan slide into its mind as though its screens weren't even there, and her touch on its thoughts is oily and irresistible.

Kerrigan squeezes, somehow, in a way that makes 49851 feel like its skull is about to crack from the inside.

"Sit up," she says, and now her voice has something terrible in it that will not be denied, and 49851 finds itself sitting up before it even has a chance to react. Every drill, every meditation, every calming ritual seems a mere sandcastle before the tidal waves of psionic power that roll off of Kerrigan, almost visible in the air, and her will drags 49851 to its feet, and then to its knees before her.

"Good," she says, and the word blooms inside 49851, somehow, and curdles up its spine and makes the veteran killer shiver, and now Kerrigan grabs its chin and forces its face upwards, towards her, towards the eyes that already hold more fear for 49851 than any enemy has before.

Kerrigan's gaze transfixes 49851, and while it kneels before her, paralyzed, her hand caresses the back of its head, almost gently, and 49851 can feel that there are fresh injuries there, and the sticky warmth of drying blood.

"Of course," Kerrigan says, pulling 49851's thoughts directly from its head. "Your psionic powers were unusably weak. Merely human. Now they are... more than human."

49851's mind races. But its shields, the ease with which Kerrigan shoved her way into its mind -

"Naturally," Kerrigan goes on, still fixing 49851 with her basilisk stare, "I couldn't have you resisting me."

49851's defiance is instinctual. Its instructors taught it to fight like a demon when in a hopeless situation, but the instant the impulse to lunge for Kerrigan forms in its mind, pain floods its body, sudden and jagged like a hacksaw across the nerves. 49851 collapses to the ground, curled into a ball, incapable of even screaming.

Kerrigan stands above it, patiently waiting while the convulsions subside.

"I told you," she says, and there's an edge of amused reproach in her voice. "Come along," she continues, and 49851 follows after her, helplessly, trailing at her heels like a dog.

\-----

She leads 49851 down a twisting, organic corridor into another room; here, she forces it onto a slab on its back and straps it down so that it can't move.

"It's time to reveal your real potential," Kerrigan says, and a smile steals over her face, edged with madness. She fixes a breathing mask over 49851's face, and with a hiss, the coppery scent of terrazine fills its nostrils.

At first, nothing seems to happen, and 49851 wishes it knew more about the effects of terrazine, but it's never needed to know before and 49851 does not know things it does not need to know.

Then, the effects hit.

49851 suddenly thrashes helplessly, straining against the restraints, as Kerrigan watches impassively. There are maybe even odds, Kerrigan knows, that the Ghost won't survive the terrazine-catalyzed expansion of its psionic powers. Either it - she, Kerrigan guesses, based on the shape of body and face and not much else - will survive and emerge greater than it's ever been, or it will be discarded and its parts recycled. Only time will tell.

\-----

Kerrigan stands silently by while 49851 hallucinates for hours on end. The terrazine burns through its system, warping it, changing it, reopening pathways the neurological engineers at the Ghost Academy closed off so carefully long ago.

Eventually 49851 goes limp, its body's reserves utterly exhausted, and lies helplessly still, panting, eyes wide and unfocused. It speaks - begs - in languages Kerrigan has never heard, languages with words that curl into evil shapes in the air, and Kerrigan feels what might be a flash of sympathy for the poor creature. The terrazine tears down the veil between reality and the Void, and some of the creatures that dwell there are... not shaped to fit within the human mind.

Kerrigan simply waits. The terrazine canister is close to empty now, and the Ghost is mute now, shaking uncontrollably. It looks like it wants to curl into a ball, but the restraints are unyielding.

With a soft click, the hiss of terrazine ends, and the canister's gauge shows empty. Kerrigan undoes the restraints, pulls the mask from 49851's face carefully, and stands above it, patient now. It's important that she be the first thing the Ghost sees when it returns to reality.

\-----

Gradually, the hallucinations give up their grip on 49851's mind, and it gropes its way back towards the real world. Things snap back into focus, and it finds itself staring up at a face, not unkind, and the world around and behind that face is solid and ordinary, and 49851 can't smell the terrible gas any longer, and an indescribable wave of relief washes over it, and 49851 is carried along on it.

While its conscious mind tries to reassemble the new data its senses are feeding it, an older instinct takes over, and 49851 launches itself off the table and into Kerrigan's arms.

Kerrigan is momentarily too stunned to move. She'd known that her being present when the terrazine haze faded would create loyalty, but not... whatever this is. She wraps the Ghost in her arms and squeezes it, unsure what to do. This is, in fact, the first survivor of this experiment, and Kerrigan is now in uncharted territory.

For want of a better plan, she picks the Ghost up - it's light, so light, even for a Terran - and carries it out of the terrazine chamber. She autopilots to her own sleeping chamber and lays the Ghost gently on the floor. When Kerrigan looks up at its face, she realizes it's unconscious, now. It would probably be good for her to be present when it awakes, just in case she has to put it down, so she folds her skeletal wings and sits next to it.

\-----

Dreams sweep 49851 away. It sees laughing faces that are long-forgotten but somehow familiar, and sunlit places, and trees, and so many other things that it doesn't even have names for any longer. It sees a house - a school - a church - all faded, as though the colors have leached out, but all somehow solid too, and then, right as 49851 is on the edge of waking, a name bubbles to the surface.

"Estelle," 49851 gasps, coughing itself awake. Kerrigan looks up at it with a start.

"What?", she says, and the thing implanted in 49851's head makes the question an overpowering command.

"My name," 49851 tries again, panting for breath. "I remember. It was Estelle."

49851 - Estelle - looks at Kerrigan again, and there is such wonder, such joy, on her face that Kerrigan is taken quite aback. Her plan accounts for the implant failing to take, for the terrazine killing the subject, and even for the hallucinations driving the subject irreversibly insane, but it does not account for that smile.

As Kerrigan's looking at her blankly, 49851's Ghost training reasserts itself amidst its strange new neural landscape. It snaps upright to a sitting position, then scrambles backwards into a corner of Kerrigan's bedchamber, one hand grasping for the knife that should be strapped between its thighs, but the knife is long-gone and training or not 49851 cannot bring itself to look at Kerrigan, not now.

"Easy," Kerrigan says, moving towards 49851, reaching out for it with an open hand. If Kerrigan was unprepared for the smile, she's even less prepared for the naked terror the Ghost shows now. The Ghost quivers, and at Kerrigan's whispered "come here", launches itself bodily at her, and Kerrigan gathers it up in her arms again.

49851 clings to Kerrigan like it's afraid of falling forever, and Kerrigan runs her claws gently through the Ghost's short brown hair. This process was supposed to produce a pliable, powerful assassin who could blend into Terran society but would remain under Kerrigan's absolute control, not... this. Slowly, 49851's breathing returns to normal, and Kerrigan reaches into its mind to make it sleep.

She needs time to think, that's all. She needs to figure out what to do next. Should she kill the Ghost? It seems like a waste to do away with the first survivor of the terrazine. The Ghost - Estelle - seems to have survived, at least physically, but her mind is disordered. Kerrigan can see it, clear as she can see 49851's face. The rigid blue structures of the Ghost conditioning have been ripped apart and burnt away by the terrazine, and the source of Estelle's strength and drive is gone. Kerrigan will just have to replace it with something better.

In the dim light of her bedchamber, still holding the sleeping 49851 in her arms, Kerrigan smiles.

\-----

A gentle voice intrudes on 49851's dream, coaxing it towards wakefulness. A woman's voice, echoing oddly, calls to it, and 49851 awakes slowly. Its first impression is of warmth, and being held, and that soothes it, and it presses closer, instinctively, to the warmth.

"That's it," Kerrigan murmurs, tilting 49851's head up towards her with one hand. As she does, she reaches into the Ghost's unprotected mind, and where 49851 saw death in Kerrigan's eyes before, now it sees safety, and the Ghost looks up at Kerrigan almost in awe. Kerrigan holds 49851's gaze, setting her face in an expression of benevolence and affection. A vision from Estelle's past, long hidden by 49851's Ghost conditioning, swims to the surface: a girl with brown hair and bright eyes and soft lips, and 49851 remembers what it felt like when Estelle kissed the girl, and then 49851, or maybe it's Estelle again now, leans in towards Kerrigan and dry lips brush over Kerrigan's, and Kerrigan rewards Estelle with a smile, and 49851 crumbles a little bit more, revealing another tiny piece of Estelle.

\-----

Estelle curls against Kerrigan, motionless, eyes unfocused, as Kerrigan reshapes her mind. Kerrigan roots out the last of her Ghost conditioning, revealing more and more of Estelle's concealed memories, and now Estelle is raw, unformed, her mind a naked tangle of unconnected ideas and feelings and sensations.

Once the last remnants of Dominion neural engineering are stripped from Estelle's mind, Kerrigan goes to work remaking her.

\-----

Kerrigan trails the tips of her claws gently down Estelle's cheek as she whispers to her. "Look at me," she mouths, and the girl's head snaps upwards to meet Kerrigan's eyes, and Kerrigan smiles at her, and murmurs, "that's it", and from the flush that creeps up Estelle's neck she knows she's succeeded.

It's not something she's tried before. Kerrigan is used to psionically dominating humans or Zerg or even Protoss as she needs, and she's no stranger to a bit of modification here and there, but this level of alteration is new. There's no way around it, though. Kerrigan needs Estelle to be able to operate away from her psionic field - maybe even inside shielded facilities - and so direct psionic control won't suffice. She needs Estelle to want to serve her, to need to serve her, deeply and completely, so that Estelle will be loyal even when she's away from Kerrigan.

Kerrigan can feel the new structure she's shaping in Estelle's mind, now, tentative but growing stronger by the second, and with the emerging structure comes a surge of wild energy as Estelle's ability to focus her power starts to return. With it comes an answering fierce surge of loyalty - no, not loyalty, devotion - to Kerrigan and the Queen of Blades can't help her smile.

"Come here," Kerrigan says, and she picks Estelle up effortlessly. The Ghost is slender and athletic, hardly muscled at all, built more for endurance and speed than strength, and Kerrigan easily carries her one-handed. She lays Estelle down on her bed, and the woman looks up at her curiously.

The bond Kerrigan built is new, still unstable, and she intends to solidify it such that it will never break.

Estelle is still wearing her undergarments, and the plain panties and bra come apart under Kerrigan's claws, and then she lays a kiss on Estelle's lips, slow and sure, and when she breaks the kiss Estelle's actually panting, her face flushed with need, and Kerrigan knows she's got her, completely, and all she needs to do is finish the bond.

"Lie still," Kerrigan almost growls, and her psionic power and the way Estelle's mind works now and the implanted thing in her head make it into a divine command, direct from the new goddess Estelle worships, and now Estelle would rather die than move. As the command soaks through her brain, Estelle feels a tremor run up and down her spine as her body reflects her mind's pleasure back at her.

Kerrigan can't remember the last time she scented human arousal. It's a heady aroma, intoxicating, and something about it makes fire zigzag through her veins. Maybe it's just because it's Estelle and there's something about her, who knows, but Kerrigan feels a powerful rush of affection for the other woman, starting somewhere low in her ribcage and building from there.

Kerrigan drags Estelle's thighs apart, and for the first time, she's actually upset with her own claws, because she needs to touch Estelle right now, has to, but she can't hurt her. Estelle is so delicate, right now, and Kerrigan needs her to feel as good as she can while the bond takes. Still, Kerrigan has a perfectly good tongue, and even some experience with using it.

It doesn't really matter, anyway. Estelle's rewired brain is having a divine experience, and every touch from Kerrigan, every slightest caress, sends energy crackling along her nerves. The former Ghost is already soaking wet when Kerrigan nuzzles between her thighs, and when Kerrigan's tongue brushes over burning skin, Estelle actually screams, overloaded with sensation. Kerrigan stops, for just a moment, and looks up, and the naked, shameless desires on Estelle's face tells her to do anything but stop.

Even with Kerrigan's half-remembered experience, it doesn't take long. All the while, she's inside Estelle's mind, too, whispering that this is what obedience feels like, that this is what serving Kerrigan feels like. Estelle shudders and squirms and twists, but Kerrigan is relentless, and even after Estelle cries out in ecstasy, she keeps going, driving Estelle over the edge so many times, and all the while she reminds Estelle, over and over, that this is the reward for loyalty.

Hours pass, by Kerrigan's reckoning. Estelle has climaxed countless times, and to her surprise, Kerrigan feels her own need, hot and almost painful, between her legs. Estelle is exhausted in body and mind, though, so Kerrigan's desire will have to wait for now. Kerrigan crawls up the other woman's body and wraps herself around her, protectively, and Estelle actually moans even while she's half-asleep because being held like this by Kerrigan feels so unspeakably good.

Kerrigan gently coaxes the former Ghost to sleep, clutching her tightly. Estelle needs rest more than anything, now, for her mind to finish reordering itself and her psionics to return. Kerrigan keeps her arms loosely wrapped around Estelle, even after she's asleep, and the thought occurs to Kerrigan that maybe the bond she's been building isn't as one-way as she thought.

She'll have to find someone else to use for her assassin after all, it seems.


End file.
